Estate planning (ICE): Advance Health Care Directive
April 29, 2015
Who do you trust to make health care decisions for you?
We’re making out our advanced care directives and while we have a basic idea of how we’d take care of each other, we need to designate decision makers if both of us are out of commission.
Our criteria
Who has enough basic knowledge of medicine and the medical establishment to be an advocate?
Who would understand our wishes AND comply with them regardless of their personal feelings, philosophy or religious beliefs?
In sum: who could we trust to intelligently make health care decisions that are in our best interests as we see them?
Our candidates
It might seem like “family” is the automatic answer, but as with other issues, that’s not necessarily the case.
I have a couple relatives who work in the medical field directly or indirectly and I would trust one of them to take the time to exercise good judgment, and seek the expertise or resources necessary to make the best possible decision for us.
PiC has a couple of friends in the same position. We would trust one of them to do the same or serve as a resource to the primary decision-maker if medical complications had to be addressed.
The other considerations are location and availability.
The person/ people we designate would have to be willing to drop everything to come to us to make those decisions in the event. While we’d certainly pay for those travel expenses, there’s no doubt that would be highly disruptive to their family lives.
Aside from the actual legalities, we need to have a clear conversation with the nominees to be sure this was something they were ready and willing to do, and make sure they have all our pertinent information as well as what we want done in case of incapacitation in writing.
At the moment, I’m fairly certain I know who I’d designate as mine. We still need PiC’s decision.
:: Have you got either a designated decision-maker or do you know who you’d trust to do the honors?
We also have a family member in the medical field listed for that. She’s listed for a lot of family!
I guess we’d probably list BF’s mom as our advocate since she’s a nurse and would be very good and following our directives. That said, we haven’t gotten to the estate planning stages of relationship yet so in the meantime I just have my mother listed as my ICE contact.
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